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“I can’t!” I shouted back at her. I’d already seen him kill one man without compunction—and I knew the darts my rifles shot weren’t as fast as the bullets from his guns.
Then I saw Snout hop down from the bench she’d sat him on, running up to bite Hargrave’s ankle, with teeth I did not know he had. Hargrave howled—until the metal dart I shot at him tore out his throat, and I surged forward, pulling Elle away from him as he fell back into the lifeboat, bleeding out.
“Elle,” I whispered at her. And here I thought I’d never touch her again. She wrestled away from me, and I had to let her; my magic was waning. I watched her close the lifeboat’s door and hit the button to set it free, my leaving my mate here, still unsafe, on my side.
“My pearl, what have you done?” I thought out to her—but this time once I broached the ’qa, everything I’d been hiding came rushing in. The pain of being dry, how my magic had now dwindled to its lowest point, and how all of the air in my tissues was trying to expand inside the habitat’s much lower pressure.
“Cepharius!” she said, running for me—no, not for me, but past me, to grab me as best she could, to help try to pull me back into the water.
I followed her down the hall and through the engine room, using my hands to crawl in desperation, dragging myself as I felt death nearing, leaving a smear of my own juices behind from the wounds their bullets had inflicted on me, feeling my tissues begin to swell as I was losing control of the magic that compressed me.
“Come on, come on,” Elle said as we reached the dock. She was picking up my tentacles and shifting them forward one by one, until some small part of me was through the edge of the square and safe into the deep.
I focused on this and eased myself after it, feeling the pressure I was used to settling all around me again.
“Oh my gosh,” Elle whispered, once I was in. “Ceph, are you okay?”
“No,” I answered her truthfully. There was a lifeboat out there that she was not in.
I could feel her giving me a bittersweet smile. “Someone had to work the door.”
“It could’ve been you. From the inside.”
“Yeah, but,” she said softly. “It would’ve meant leaving the sea.”
I thrashed my head back and forth. “This is not how I wanted you to stay, Elle.”
“Me either—but the ship needed the battery, Ceph, so I don’t really think that lifeboat was going up anymore. Plus, I wanted to see things through.”
I breathed roughly, regaining my strength, and stared through the square of water at her, both of us trapped in our own worlds, and both of us in our own way dying: her, from the fact that her habitat was running out of power, and me from a broken heart.
There was only one thing left to say. “Would you like to come out here and watch with me?” I asked, reaching through the water-square to offer her an arm.
She nodded. “Let me get on my suit.”
chapter 63
ELLE
I got into the spare suit, and Ceph reached through the water to help me pull on all the pieces. Then I went into the crane-nest and turned everything that seemed reasonably cable-related on, knowing that no matter what I did, the power was going out.
“And you’re sure,” Cepharius asked when I was on the cusp of crossing over.
“With you?” I told him. “Always.”
I stepped across.
He’d gone up to get the lifeboat while I’d been flipping switches, and so now he was carrying both of us across the barren ocean floor, the lifeboat beneath one of his arms, with Snout and the battery inside and in fine form, and me beneath the other, with his tentacles metering out my cable behind us.
We weren’t talking, but I thought that was because we could already read each other’s minds. He was radiating a deep sorrow, and I was sorry too, to be hurting him.
But I was also filled with love, because I was proud of us and what we had accomplished and because there was no place else I’d rather be than at his side.
“I love you,” I told him, and he rumbled in response.
“I know,” he said, before looking down at me. “It is your only flaw.”
I grinned at him. “You’d better be joking, Cepharius.”
